They are the plaintiff in this case. They're still stuck in the steam age of media technology and royalty mechanisms. Rulings and concepts from the 50ies and 60ies. Super annoying. You don't want to get pissy with them because they have a de-facto government mandated monopoly on collecting royalties. Quasi a semi private semi official body for that exact purpose.

The biggest problem with Apple for users probably isn't any of their anticompetitive shit, but rather their bifurcated OS. Software which could be sold on both platforms is commonly only on one or the other. Tablets have enough screen and enough power to do real PC jobs but are prohibited from doing them because Apple wants to sell you both an iPad and a Macintosh. Android-based tablets can run emulators to get around these problems, or run full apps which can run on ARM Linux in Termux or another solution. TBF Google seems to have Apple envy and is aiming to lock down their systems more and not less so maybe they will throw away this advantage.

Now explain how the noblemen is doing the herdsmen a kindness by charging them rent.

Also, in NYC, explain the chronically vacant commercial space (hint, no rent control).

I'm sorry, simply calling this crack-pipe dream of a "project" "poor design" is an epic understatement. A few examples:

- Building the line would eat up 60% of the worlds entire steel production for decades on end.

- The "chandelier stadium" is so l00ny and physically impossible that it might as well be dreamt up and squiggled on a piece of paper with crayons by a 5-year old. Advisors told the deciders this and they still chose to ignore them.

- The basin planned for the cruise ship docks at the west end would clog up due to lack of flow.

- Basic stuff like sewage treatment isn't even considered, as is way to common with these people I have to say. As with this stupid ultra-high sky-scraper, sewage management is/was intended to be done with trucks. Every day 200 trucks line up to empty the sewage tanks of that skycraper, then drive to Bahrain and simply dump the sewage into the ocean where it then get's carried right back to the coast of Dubai to stink up the beaches and that palm-tree island thing.

I could go on and on.

The list of inane and flat-out retarded decisions surrounding this and other projects is endless. These are infantile pipe-dreams by badly educated Arabian dimwitts with too much money on their hands and too many yay-sayers around them who are too greedy to ask them to stop being silly. Everybody with two or more braincells to rub together knew that this wouldn't go that far if at all anywhere. Perhaps the deciders should take things down a few notches because right now they actually _do_ have enough amounts of money to really make a change for large portions of the population in those regions and get themselves independent from oil. Perhaps let some smart people present some realistic ideas?

Do they also provide build tools and allow customers to build and install their own images?

You have to have punishments to stop the people who are stopped by the threat of them. Those people do exist. We don't think about them much because the existing deterrents work just fine on them.

But you also shouldn't waste your time either believing that they will deter everyone, nor that stronger punishments will deter statistically more people. There are always those who think they won't get caught, and those who don't care.

Somehow authoritarians always forget the carrot. The stick isn't invalid, it just isn't a complete solution, and you shouldn't be rushing to apply it in all situations.

What's stopping you? There's definitely people doing this right now. Around a quarter of the continental US is BLM land. Last I looked pig tags were free.

Mostly true but not entirely. For the moment at least there are still applications such as airplanes where fossil fuels have no reasonable alternative. But yes, a large number of things that we currently power by burning long-dead dinosaurs could just as well work with other sources of energy.

And yeah, I think the whole world looks at the Middle East and is thinking: If you all so much want to kill each other, why don't we just step back and let you?

Some born with golden spoon in mouth boy is learning the expensive way that no, money can NOT buy everything. The laws of physics don't care how rich you are or how much money you throw at them. :-)

... with ginormous sun-rich empty spaces of mainland that we could solarize at record speed - as China is doing right now with results as shown - in order to get this fossil-fuel eco-turnaround happening ASAP. Wouldn't that be nice, no?

You debunked your own comment, there's nothing for me to do here :)

What you're missing, as usual, is that IT DOESN'T EXIST YET but you're claiming that it does, as usual.

FTFS, "it's the first version of UNIX in which the kernel and some of the core utilities were rewritten in the new C programming language"

Yes, this place really has gone to shit.

Yes, but we could also develop the same technologies and then not spend the money going to space, and instead implement them here, and think about space exploration once we're sure we have a future.

People do it to me constantly (a day without a 3-5 comment serial downmod is unusual) and I don't have to post AC to keep my Karma in the excellent range.